TechStuff Classic: The Electronic Arts Story: Part One

This is clearly one that I'm going to have to do an update for a lot has happened in seven years, and there's a lot more to say about e A. But we have to have a start somewhere, right, So let's go back and listen to the Electronic Arts Story, Part one. This particular story is pretty interesting. We're specifically talking about Electronic Arts or e A, which a lot of people view these days as some sort of megalomaniacal

corporation on dominating the entire video game industry. Yeah, and it's uh yeah, well, I mean, well we'll get into it later on, but but it but it is one worst company in America twice, two years in a row, two years in a row. Yeah. Yeah, But but to start off, you know, it's it didn't start off as this UH company that was bent on on having a

stranglehold on the video game industry. And I'm not saying that that's what he has now or that's goal, that's what's goal is, but that's what that's the popular perception that is. Well, you know, to be fair, it does as twenty five million registered players and is operating out of seventy five countries, so it's not doing too shadows company. But but it had had interesting beginnings. Now to really understand how A started, you actually have to go way

back before e A was a thing. Uh. And my first date that I wrote down was in nineteen fifty three because that's when William M. Trip Hawkins the third was born. Now, this guy is going to be the founder of EA when we get up to that point, but um, he was. It was his idea to start up a video game company and UH. And you know the way he came about this was as he was growing up and going to school, he started to get really interested in uh, computers in general and games as well.

In fact, in nineteen seventy he designed a board game. It was a football board game called ACU stat Pro Football. Yeah, he borrowed five thousand dollars from his father to get this off the ground. And it was a complete commercial failure. Right. It was his first entrepreneurial attempt and it and it failed, which often we can learn a lot more from our failures than our successes. But it teaches us a couple

of things about Hawkins. That he's interested in games, and he's interested in football in particular, which becomes extremely evident. And during the evolution of e A right, right, and he had started kind of designing stuff. He was a big D and D player from I understand, and and was really interested in how all of the math and statistics worked. But noticed that a lot of his friends were not interested in doing that at all, and so

he was kind of thinking like, hey, what if. Yeah, he was looking at at different ways of creating sets of rules and statistics. And and also at the same time, he was starting to get interested in computers. Now in

the early seventies, this is predating the personal computer. If you were interested in computers, it's because you had a job that there were computers at your job, or maybe you were attending university and they were computers there right right in in seventy when he had his first interaction ever with a prototype a micro computer. This was over at a friend's house and uh, and that kind of

set him up for a couple of years later. Yeah, in nineteen seventy three, he has access to a d E C PDP eleven mini computer and he creates a program written in the Basic programming language that was designed to run simulations of football games. So not exactly a fully interactive gaming experience. It's more like, if I put in every player's stats and then set this to go and have it play out as if it were a game,

what would the results be? And he tested it by running a simulation of what was going to be at that time, the nineteen seventy four Super Bowl game, and it turned out that his his game ended up predicting the final score fairly closely. In his game, it said that the Dolphins would win over Minnesota twenty three to six, and the real score was actually twenty four to seven, So at least in that sense, the statistics seemed to

hold true. Now, of course, we all know that in reality, from a day to day basis, statistics can give you an indication of how things might go, but there's no guarantee that's how they will go, right. Yeah, So so Luck could have certainly been involved in that one, but you know not. Nonetheless, he was a student at Harvard at the time. He graduated with a self designed major

in strategy and applied game theory. That's an interesting major right there, especially fore right, so he says that he spent a couple of years convincing Harvard to to let him get that degree because that was what he wanted. And I would go on to get an MBA from Stanford. Yep. And when he graduated in nineteen with that NBA, he went to work for a little company called Apple. And at that time it really was a little company. Yeah, they had just just about fifty employees at the time. Yeah,

fifty employees. He had joined early on. This is, of course, you know, right at the very onset of the personal computer era. The Apple two was the first computer from Apple to really hit it off in the market. The first Apple was mostly adopted by people who were hobbyists or really had a fascination with computers, but it was not a commercial success. What didn't run away with the market, Apple two was a totally different story. That was the one that a larger niche began to get interested in

personal computers. It still was still you know, kind of in the hobbyist air, rah, but it was a looser definition of hobbyists at that point, not just people who were obsessed with computers. And I mean that in the nicest way. I come from a family that's part of

this niche. So yeah, Hawkins has said that in seven he saw an Apple two at a computer fair and realized that this was kind of you know, he had been churning around this, this concept of of games and computers and programming for a couple of years and decided that Apple was, yes, the way to go. He's not

the only one either. There were a lot of early game developers who were looking at personal computers as the platform of choice, and many of them, uh showed an early preference for the Apple to Richard Garriott of Origin also had that same fascination. So Hawkins works for Apple. By two, he was the director of strategy and marketing

at Apple Computers. So from yeah, that those humble beginnings, and of course by then Apple was doing very very well and had already at its initial public offering, which netted Hawkins quite a bit of money and so he made a big, risky decision. He decided that his fascination of games and computers needed to really be indulged, and

so he left Apple Computer. Well, he supposedly had had decided almost a decade prior that in two would be the year for him to start a business, to start a computer business, and that that that would be the year that that the home computing market had caught up to his desire to plan it. Now, now, I both of us honestly don't know whether or not that's truly what he thought that some of the stuff, some of the stuff he says, he says, well, after the time rights,

it could be retcond is all I'm saying. I'm not saying he definitely did do that. I'm just I have a little bit of skepticism either either way. On two fun fact, the day before I was born, Um, in case any he needed to feel really old. Right now, thank you, La, You're welcome. Um, he he incorporated Electronic Arts and And this was not going to This was not the original name that he had thought of for

the company. No, No, he actually originally wanted to call it Amazing Software, but that just didn't seem to really click. He got a bunch of people together to try and uh brainstorm and idea. He had actually used two thousand dollars of his own money to fund this early part of the company, UH, and he they started thinking about

other possible names. One of the names they came up with was soft Art, but the head of another company that was called Software Software Arts asked him if he would reconsider naming his company that just to avoid any confusion, and he agreed to do that. Had another brainstorming session and that came up with Electronic Arts. Along with a team of other folks and marketing people as well an

outside marketing company, and Electronic Arts was born. They would actually receive by the end of nine two two million dollars in venture capital from Sequoia Capital, and Sequoia Capital even gave them some office space to work out of before they had any sort of physical headquarters, right right, very originally, I think he worked out of his own home when he was hiring his first couple of people, and UH, all of these people that he was hiring at the time, and the naming of the company kind

of came about because he really wanted, um, he really believed that computer games are an art form and wanted UM wanted the game company to operate kind of like a music label. UM. And this is really evident in some of their early marketing campaigns and attempts. You know, they would get these game developers together and pose them like rock stars have, have rock music photographers come in and do these gorgeous photographs of them and and really

concentrate on the software artist. Yeah, even the art they would use in their the games they sold, which in those days, games didn't come in boxes yet. They were in usually plastic bags, and you had some art that would be included. But it it looked pretty look like a lot of Yeah, it look like a lot of these games came out of someone's garage. And here's here's a fun fact. A lot of them did. UM but uh e A. They took an approach where they really put a lot of graphic design work into the art

that was included with the games. And there were several sources I read that likened the the art on the games to album you would see on what we used to you know, buy music on, which were these giant vinyl albums. I actually kids are doing that again now, but bund there was a while where I would say vinyl album and I just get that blank stare um. Those days appeared to have disappeared again for at least

a while, but I'll see that keeps up. They actually moved to the headquarters in San Mateo, California, and they were there for quite a few years. Ultimately they ended up moving again. But and also you know, e A expanded greatly, But we'll get into all of that. So they're early early efforts were concentrated on a few titles, uh, and they wanted to produce all of their games internally. They wanted to be a publisher, a developer, and a distributor.

So these are all different parts of the video game industry. And you can have a company that's just one of these things, or you can have a company that does multiple roles here. But to break it down, essentially, you have publishers that these are the companies that fund the

development of video games. Now, they might have a development team within the publisher, or they may pay an independent developer to create a game, but they are the ones who say, here's some money, we believe in the project that you have pitched, why don't you go ahead and build that game. Then you give us the game, and we will make sure the game gets to distributors, who

will then make sure the game gets two stores. And then the way it generally works if if you're talking about an independent developer and a publisher, the publisher will give an advance to the developer, and that advance is against any future royalties that the game sells until you pay off that advance, and then you usually have some sort of royalty sharing program where the publisher gets a certain amount of the money from sales and the developer

gets another you know, a percentage of those sales as well, but the advance has to be paid off first because that's the initial investment the publisher makes to the developer. Developers are of course, those are the people who developed the games, are the ones who actually build the games. So again, it can be an independent company, it could be part of a publisher, it could be part of

a distributor. Uh, either are all different types of models out there, but these are the people actually building the code, making the art, writing the games. That's that's yeah. Then you've got the distributors. Now, these are the people who are responsible for delivering finished games from publishers and delivering them to retail establishments and other outlets, so they sell gain.

The publishers sell their games to distributors, and then the distributors take those games and sell them to the retail operators who then sell them to the public. So e

A was all three of these things right. And at the time, Hawkins has said that he had done a lot of market research and that a hundred and thirty five of his competitors were doing the same thing um which which seems like an awfully large number, although at the time we were just on the verge of a little bit of a market crash a little bit, a

little bit as a little bit is understating it. Yeah, but but but but during this boom there were there was a lot going on um and And also the concept reminds me a lot of Apple's Apple is a really terrific example of vertical integration and um and from his time at Apple, I feel like probably that's one of the places where he picked up this concept. We'll be back to talk more about e A in just

a moment, but first let's take a quick break. The first six titles from e A included games called Hard Hat mac which was kind of like a Mario clone. Um it's or Donkey Kong clone. I really should say not Mario, but a Donkey Kong clone. It was a platforming game a side not even a side scralling. It was you know, it's kind of like Donkey Kong. Then you had the pinball construction set. There was a game

called which you don't let you build pinball systems. Then you had arcn which was kind of a weird fantasy strategy game that was part chess, part action game. The idea being that you have two sides. Uh. Two sides have different pieces that are kind of like chess pieces. The different pieces have different abilities, and you try to take over your opponent's territory. Whenever one of your pieces comes in contact with an opponent's piece, you then have

a little arcade like battle between the two. Right and depending upon what your pieces, you might be able to really whoop up on your opponent because you're faster or your shots do a lot more damage. Uh and and so it was all about strategy, like I want to make sure this piece goes up against my that piece my opponent has, so I can I can win the game. You can kind of tell that I played the heck out of this game. By the way, I also owned the Pinball Construction set and I owned hard Hat Mac.

Then there was a Mule, which was another strategy game. A lot of people who enjoyed this really like things like a war gaming where you would have the big table with all the hexagons, we move the pieces around. Mule was kind of the computer version of that. Yeah, it was really built for four players, which at the time was was kind of unheard of. Yeah, and I never got into it because my brain does not work

that way. I can I can do well enough in our con because even if my strategy skills aren't that great, my twitch skills were good enough to help me get by, but Mule not so much. Then there was Worms, which was kind of a high concept game where you would train these what they called worms, these these these lines of light to behave in a certain way in order to progress in the game. And it's very difficult to explain.

And I've always seen people who say, if you want to play the game, if you want to try it out, find a copy of it and give it a whirl. I mean, you can find stuff like this on the internet. Uh, you should do it without reading the instructions, just to see if you can figure out what the heck is going on. Um. And I mean I read a description of this, and I'm not sure I would be able to figure it out. But maybe it's more intuitive than the descriptions would give you. Uh that then the description

seemed to indicate. And then the last of the six titles that they launched with when the company was first offering up games was Murder on These zinder Kneuf, which I know nothing about. I did not own that one. Yeah, I I should put in that I have played zero of these games. Well, they you know, right around when you were one, so I'm not surprised. So but I had most of these games because they came out for

the Apple too, and we had an Apple too. And actually what happened was a local school had purchased a bunch of games and then they gave them to me to test and tell them which ones were educational and which ones were not really educational. So I did, and then I returned all the games and they said, all right, you can keep all the ones that aren't educational. Yeah, So as a kid, I was like ching and um, and so yeah, I ended up with a lot of

a lot of early games. That's also how I ended up learning about the Ultimate series because Ultimate two was one of those games. But uh yeah, so there was that was the initial launching title, but there were some other ones that came out shortly thereafter. There was The Last Gladiator, which is a game I also owned. Um that that one didn't come in the batch. I won that one as a as a part of a lip

syncing contest. What pray tell, were you lip sinking? Me and my dad did a lip sinking routine to raise Stevens the Pirates song, which is all about a pirate who wants to sing and dance and wear bright shiny pants. Well that's that's a that's awesome. Yeah. We won first place, which was a fifty dollar gift certificate to a local

comics store. And I don't read comic books, so I bought all their computer games instead, and one of them was The Last Gladiator, And that was a game where you play as a little gladiator and all these different monsters come out and based upon whatever weapon you have at your disposal, you have uh you know, decent chances against them. It gets more and more difficult as the game goes on. You know, it's kind of a typical

Arcady experience. Um. They also had they launched a game that would end up being sort of the genesis of e A sports. Dr J and Larry Bird Go one on one. I'm told this is from a sport called basketball and so on. That's one with the orange round thing. Correct, Uh, I want to say yes, yeah, this this was one of the earliest. Uh well, it was the earliest sports game from e A and Hawkins really struck on a

brilliant idea. He had decided to try and approach people who were famous in various sports and to license their their names to get that media tie in. Yeah right, Yeah, they get a promotional tie in from famous famous athletes, I mean Dr J and Larry Bird or especially at the world famous and and which is interesting because the world famous since they were playing an American sport that

was almost exclusively played in America. Um. They ended up that they ended up paying off big time and being a strategy that e A still to this day employees. They also established a new policy which was to in order to keep more of the profits that it would get from its uh from the sales it was going to reduce the discount it gave software distributor sports games, meaning that uh, they were essentially selling their games at

a higher cost. Two stores saying all right, well, you know, we're no longer going to sell this game to you at ten dollars a copy. We're gonna sell it to you for thirty dollars a copy. And uh, and you know it's your truck. Uh, it's your problem to figure out how to sell this. So if you're if you usually sell your games at forty dollars, now you're paying thirty bucks to sell it for forty, your profit margin has shrunk as a software disc a software retail store. Um,

you know, do you continue trying to do that? Do you hike your prices up and hope that people are willing to pay it? Uh. E A's point was that, hey, we're starting to make a name for ourselves. People know our product and they like it. So if if they like it and this is the only way they can get it, then you're gonna have to play ball with us. And this is sort of the first example of e

A really throwing its weight around. Yeah. This was also the year that it made its conference debut at the Consumer Electronics Show, and so, yeah, they were really really getting out there in the public and starting to make make waves. Yeah, and keep in mind this is all in the first year that they're actually offering games. You know, they had been a company for a while, but of course, you know, as soon as they became a company, it

didn't mean that they had games to offer everybody them. Uh. They also had established these ideas that you know, every single person who worked on the game was going to be credited. If you were the creator of a game, your name was front and center on the game's screens. It would let you know that this was a game developed by so and so. And that was a response to a lot of the the activity they were seeing

on the console market, particularly with Atari. Uh, and that there were people who were essentially anonymous game developers who had put in hours and hours and hours of time to create video games, but there was no sign of credit for them on on the actual video games. It was just you know, is this is you ex title

from X company? Sure. Yeah. The word that I've seen tossed around in a lot of articles about it is is surfs that these people were being treated like surfs and and Hawkins was was saying that you know, some of these kids that he had met out at Apple were were and I quote legitimate divas, and and that they deserved better than that. Yeah, and they Let's make it clear, e A was not the only company doing this.

There were other companies that split off from Atari, for example, that were founded by developers who wanted to have more more control and more credit for the work that they were doing. So e A is one example of that, but it's by no means the only example of that. Now UH in four Larry Probst joined the company as the vice president of sales, and he will become really important to e A. He was already important at that point,

but becomes even more so over the years. UH and e A begins to distribute games from other companies, not just their own companies. So now they're becoming a distributor for other UH publishers. And one of the first ones was Lucasfilm Games. There was also s s I and Interplay. They all used Electronic Arts as a distributor. So now they're bringing in money not only from the games that they are developing in their their own house, but also

from developers. Yeah, this was this was the year that the that the video game market really crashed or was really feeling all of the effects of the crash. Um. And this was due to a lot of a lot of things, but um, but but mostly you know, Atari had been kind of sort of driving the market into the ground for a minute. Yeah, yeah, the market was completely flooded with games, and and not good games necessarily.

There were some there's some great titles that were among the ones that came out that year, but there were Atari had essentially lowered the bar so far for anyone to submit games to the console that it was flooded with games that were just rushed, that had bad art, that were poorly constructed, that were impossible to play. Um. And this made people stop wanting to buy games because

they were just not fun. Right. And also there were so many consoles on the market, you know, it had kind of boomed, and and these things cost four to eight hundred dollars in today's in today's concept of the dollar, right, and so you know, yeah, it was it was not sustainable at the time without the quality of games that were coming out, and there was such an early boom that it was just a rush, right, and then the rush was followed by a bubble bursting, which we see

all the time, not just in technology but in all kinds of markets. And uh and so you know, as of a game company, Electronic Arts had a tough year ahead of it because you know that was it was affected to it. Even though a lot of its games were being made for specters. I was saying p seas but really at this time we weren't really calling the PCs yet, but yeah, they were being made for computers. It still was affected because uh, you know, a lot of consumers got jaded on the concept of games in

the first place. That was, however, the year that they published a game called The Seven Cities of Gold, which I also owned. Uh yeah, I was. I was known for being a terrible, terrible columnists colonialist. I guess I should say I would go in and wreak havoc on the various Mayan and az tech cultures and plunder them. Yeah. I've heard that it was a very educational game, edutainment edutainment toll. Yeah. I want to say that I bought that one, and that one was not part of the package,

because if it were part of the package. Then obviously I fipped about it being educational. Um. And then e A began to switch its strategy at this point, when the video game market had crashed, and instead of marketing games as being from specific creators the way they had been where they had made these developers rock stars, uh, they were instead going to look at creating actual brands

and genres. So instead of saying from the mind of so and so, they said, why don't we find a game that really resonates with people and then just continue to create games within that brand title or more even just within that type of gameplay. Uh. This would actually end up being something that people would criticize e A four years later to the point where they well, they've they've taken it to something of an extreme, but we'll get into that. Yeah, Like yes, and they also decided

to start making games for lots of different platforms. So besides the Apple two, they started looking at the Macintosh, which was brand new in uh, the Amiga, the Commodore sixty four IBM compatibles, which were just starting to take off right around then. Uh, the Atari eight hundred, and the Attari st We've got a bit more to say about electronic arts. But first, let's take another quick break.

All right, we're back, and let's go back into what's going on with the e A. So comes round and e A starts releasing a bunch of games, including some that were really famous in the fantasy gaming genre. Uh, the big one being The Bard's Tale, which I also owned. I did, I did not? I think. Well, it was very Dungeons and Dragons ish. You would control a party

of players. You would you would generate characters and then put them together in a party, and uh, this was kind of standard for a lot of other video games at the time. Wizardry was very similar in this respect, where you would have certain number of fighters, a certain number of magic users, maybe a thief or even a bard who could affect the way the party performed by playing different songs. That was one of the big innovative

gameplay elements of The Bard's Tale. So you know, play a little song and then everyone gets gets all amped up and they fight better, or you play another song and everyone's starting to feel kind of chill and they start healing and faster. That's terrific, useful bards, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah, as opposed to and uh, there's this guy Guy's singing again. We can't get them to shut up. We've broken four

loots and he doesn't get the hint. Well. The other the alternative title for the Bard's Tale was Tales of the Unknown Volume one when it was a fantasy RBG and you. There was something really creative about the Bard's Tale series, which was that you could import players from other games all right on certain platforms app Apple two

is one of them. Yeah, um yeah, you can. You can pull in things from from Ultima, which was from Origin Systems that was not part of Electronic Arts at that time, or from the aforementioned Wizardry, which was from Curtech, also not part of e A. So these are games made by other companies and allowed interoperability in the sense that you could pull like if you had play this other game and you had these characters that you had developed some sort of emotional attachment to and you had

really invested in this game, you could then pull those characters into The Bard's Tale and use them again in a totally different game, which was kind of an awesome idea. I will say that from my own personal experience from playing Wizardry and then pulling characters in from Wizardry into

The Bard's Tale. They ended up being a tad overpowered, like to the point where the whole first section of the game was pointless to play because you just would you know blast, Yeah, essentially like if I were to encounter a moth and you were to give me a sledgehammer. Uh, you know. That's kind of the way it felt. But it was still a really cool game mechanic. Now. In six and in they would release sequels to the Bard's Tales.

You get bards Tale two and Bard's Tale three. I remember Bard's Tale three in particular, that was the one I played the most. And into thousand four we saw the release of The Bard's Tale. But this is a game that was not released by e A, nor was it connected directly to the Bard's Tale games. But it was created by someone who had worked on the first two.

That's right, Yeah, that one of the people who helped develop the maps in the first two Bards Tale games was the developer behind The Bard's Tale the two thousand four games. So I remember being excited when that game came out because I thought, oh, they're relaunching this this franchise that I loved as a kid. Yeah, it was more just the name. I was still a fantasy RPG, and you played a character who was very snarky thief.

Bard character voiced by Carrie El was. Oh man, well that sounds that sounds worth playing just for just for that. It was. It was entertaining first five minutes. You had a narrator and you had Carrie Ell was this character, and they would bicker as you played. So that was kind of fun. But it again didn't relate back to the Bard's Tale Games of My youth, So I was tricked. They're tricks. E UH was also an e A released

their first productivity application, which was called Deluxe Paint. It's a program for the Commodore Amiga, which was known as a machine that was particularly powerful when it came to graphics and sound. When you compared it against the other computers, the Amiga blew them away. As far as that well, I mean I had a friend who had Amiga, and I remember just being completely flabbergasted that a computer could do what his Amiga could do as far as graphics

and sound. We're concerned because when you compared it to my Apple two or my two eighties six, it just it outperformed him hands down in that So it was a great game platform. But this was a painting platform or a painting application, I should say, And it was based off of an in house art development tool that that e A had been using that they called Prism. So they essentially took this in health tool and then packaged it and changed it a bit for consumers. So hey, kids,

kids would be into this too. Yeah, like, you know, we're using this to develop games, but I think people would really be interested in using this for themselves. So I'm sure they tweaked it so that would make sense to a consumer, but hopefully yeah, or not just release it the way it was, because you know, things, things make you have different kinds of tools for people who are professionals in an industry and people who are just interested in it. Yeah, but yeah, that was an interesting

departure from just creating games. Um, I don't have anything, and I should say I didn't say this at the top of the show, but we're not going to cover every release e A ever made, because first of all, that would take us about five hours I think just to list every game, and second of all, that would that would be a really boring podcast that would be that would be like like, yeah, even for our threshold, that would be boring. So we don't want to I'm

just kidding. I'm just kidding, But no, I I agree entirely. And so we're gonna mentioned some of the big ones, obviously, especially the ones that ended up being disruptive to e A or to the industry. But but in this case, we're we're just kind of skimming through some of the big ones and not hitting every single one. Son was when e A set up a European division to market

PC games. Now, at this point it was just to kind of be a marketing firm, not a development house, but uh, they saw a lot of opportunity to expand into Europe. The problem with Europe was that it was being very it was very slow to adopt consoles. It was this is true later on when we started getting into the advanced consoles, to the ones like are the current generation PlayStation forward Europe. It's not that Europe was not interested in it's just it was slower to adopt

it than other markets. So e A was trying to really invest in what they saw as being a huge opportunity. Yeah. So so that's that was the beginning of that. And in A released waste Land, which was a post apocalyptic role playing game that's pretty you know, innovative. There were some other post apocalyptic RPG type stuff that was out for computers. Some of them were just text based games,

not even graphics games. But but yeah, wait, Wasteland is one that that I I still we are still not in the era of me playing video games that are not um maybe super Mario Brothers. But but but I but I A lot of my friends speak with speak

of it with a lot of nostalgia. See. The reason why I know so many of these e A titles is because I followed the same kind of pathway that e A did, and that I abandoned consoles shortly after the Atari era and moved on to PCs because I saw it as being a platform that would allow for more sophisticated types of games. And that's something that Hawkins and self headset as well. It's one of the reasons why e A in its early days focused on computers

not on consoles. There were other reasons as well, like if you want to build a console or a game for a console, it gets pretty expensive from a production standpoint, because you have to manufacture the cartridges, you have to build the ROMs directly onto chips, you have to build the cases, all this kind of stuff. Um, and so there were higher costs associated with producing a video game cartridge than a computer disk. So, uh, they had their

own reasons for really focusing on computers versus consoles. So yeah, the console market didn't really recover until until the ny S came out, Tony, Yeah, yeah, right around the round eighty eight, that's when e A started to reevaluate this position of focusing on PC only instead of or computers only, since PC we tend to think of as anything that runs DOS or Windows. But anyway, at that that time, that's when e A was starting to really look at the NES and say, well, maybe there's a reason to

get into this now. Entering into any kind of agreement with Nintendo was something that Hawkins was a bit reluctant to do because Nintendo had very strict licensing agreements and standards that you had to meet. Because Nintendo did not want another video game crash. They absolutely they're being very careful about what they published exactly. They did not want

the market flooded with bad games. Not to say that every game that came out for the NES was amazing, but they were trying to keep as much of a control on that as possible. And you know that's something that publishers are or or game developers might view as being a barrier. You know, they might go through the trouble of developing a game only to hit a roadblock with the licensing problem, and then you've got all this time and energy and money that was spent on something

that you can't actually sell. So there was a big issue there. But they did decide to start developing games for the NES, and the first one was Skate or Die, which my friends who had any S IS they loved that game. I did not have an any S so I was largely ignorant of it. I was still playing the computer games at that time. UH. And instead of just publishing the game directly and distributing it, they actually

licensed it out to Konami. UH. And then Hawkins said that the console market was still just unproven, that that the crash from before was so devastating that you could not be certain it wouldn't happen again, and also again said that consoles were kind of underpowered when you compared

them to computers. UM. Now. They would later really revisit this, especially once the Sega Genesis came out UH and and their their tune changes dramatically, but at that time they were really saying computers are really that's that's our main focus. Consoles or something we might do as a side project. Sure, so they released a game that became one of the most important franchises in the company's history, and I am

of was talking about John Madden Football. UH. Hawkins has a lot of There are a lot of interviews with Hawkins where he talks about his fond memories of developing that game, about bringing John Madden into the experience and saying that, you know, we would show him how we were doing things, and then he would spend the next twenty minutes yelling at us about how we got it wrong. And but it was always in an effort to make sure the game was as good as it possibly could be.

So while Madden's approach was what some people might call aggressive and meant that they were working on making a really good football game, or at least that was there. That was the goal, and it did become one of the most successful franchises his history. Yeah, as their twenty four games out and it's sold million units. Now we'll talk more about some controversy with Madden Football, but that

really plays in a few years down the line. Uh. In nine, they began to develop games for the Sega Genesis console, and this is when they started to really rethink that approach and say, all right, maybe consoles are actually important enough for us to consider it being a main line of business, not just some little side business where we can make a little extra money. There might

be some serious cash in this business. Hawkins has said that that this deal that he made with with Sega was kind of a crowning moment and has has said that he had been um kind of stealthily reverse engineering the sixty bit Seco Genesis for a couple of years and that when Sega found out about this, um, you know it's it's it could have gone one of two ways. Either Sega could have sued him a whole lot, or they could have created this this kind of awesome contract

for for creating games, and and it went. Hawkins has said that, yes, that this is one of his big wins in life. He essentially said that that he negotiated an incredibly favorable deal for Electronic Arts. This was something he could not do in Nintendo because Nintendo held so much of the power in that relationship. And uh, you know, when it comes to big business, guys, you know whoever holds the power that that becomes an important part of of any deal. And it was certainly something that Hawkins

was very concerned about. Even if you think back to the days of him saying, you know, I want this company to be about video games and art, you can tell there's still a cutthroat businessman lurking underneath that artist exterior there and um, and so yeah, this was a great example of that. And uh, in the fall of nine, that's when Electronic Arts held its initial public offering, the I p oh, That's when it became a publicly traded company.

And uh, Hawkins decided, in order to really justify going public and to to get investors excited and invested in the company and to really increase the value of the company, to initiate a policy where every single month he expected there to be three new games entering into the development process, not not completed, but entered into So you know that that would mean that as time goes on, you have more and more overlapping games until some come out for

publication while others are entering the development process. It Uh, it's set a pretty tough standard. But and also they were handling games from other developers at this point too, so that this didn't even include those games right right, And the company at the time it's worth about sixty million, yeah and uh, and of course the the value of the company now is in the billions. But will again address that when we get further up into the timeline.

And in ninety one, that is a momentous year for both Hawkins and for e A. That's when Trip Hawkins decided to leave e A. He had felt that he had accomplished all he wanted with the company and that it was time for him to move on to something new and challenging. And that new and challenging thing ended up being three d O, which was you know, the whole idea was he was going to create a video game console that would lead the market. It would be the most powerful, uh console, and it actually it was

predictive of the consoles that we see today. It was meant to be sort of an entertainment center, not just a video game console, but it was really expensive. Uh. And also the games that first came out for the three D O didn't get a lot of critical acclaim and a lot of them relied heavily on full motion video. That was when full motion video was just becoming possible in the computer and console worlds. So people were using it a lot, to the point where it became a gimmick.

You know, you thought that, oh, this game is good because as full motion video in it. Then and you know, full motion video, like any other tool, is just a tool. It's just a tool. Yeah, if you're if you're using three D for example, these days, it's just just a gimmick. It's just a gimmick. Yeah, exactly, so, and that was the that was the ultimate problem with three D O, which spoiler alert, did not take off. It actually it. Yeah. Meanwhile, back at e A, Larry Probst steps in. He becomes

the CEO of e A, uh and uh. Nintendo that same year ninety one launched the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the S and E s or Ness, if you insist on pronouncing it that way. And then e A began to develop games both for the Genesis and for Nintendo and in an effort to really kind of hit as many fans as possible. They also said they prefer there to be lots of different consoles competing in the market because that means there's not one dominant player that can

use the leverage against them. You know, when there are a lot of different players out there, then e A has the advantage, which has been an important part of the company's Yeah, it's it's really clever business business standpoint. Yeah, it's another one of those things that some people get a little I think people want games to be fun and they don't want to think about the business end of it because the business end is not necessarily fun.

It can be pretty pretty, pretty grand. Yeah. But anyway, that that was that was starting to take off right in ninety one, and that was when e A made its first real acquisition, which was Distinctive Software, So they bought an outside development studio. The idea was to kind of they saw talent out there that they wanted to get, and instead of trying to hire the talent away, they thought, well, we're a larger company. Now, we're publicly traded, we're highly valued.

Let's use this opportunity to purchase this other company and make it part of what we do. And Distinctive Software was the company that had created the test Drive series for Accolade, which of course was a competing company to Electronic Arts. And so this same division ended up creating a new line of games for Electronic Arts called Need

for Speed. You know, you may have played those games. Uh. And then eventually Distinctive Studios was renamed e A Canada and it's it's because it was located at an British Columbia that's correct, over in Vancouver. And uh. Yeah, that was also the year that the e A established a Sports as a division. Yeah, so now we finally have an actual formal division within Electronic Arts that is overseeing

the development of sports titles. And a lot of big sports titles came out of that division, Madden Football, FIFA games that were related to hockey to basketball, um, and of course that will become more important as well. That wraps up a classic episode the Electronic Arts Story Part one. I can't wait to find out what happens in part two, even though it happened more than seven years ago now, But we're gonna go and check that out next week.

If you guys have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter. The handle at both of those is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Rate Deo production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H